Apple’s winning the tablet PC war just by staying on the sidelines. As long as they don’t show their hole card, nobody can take a poke at whatever they’re planning to roll out into the tablet/e-reader space.

Microsoft, on the other hand, turned everything face up last night, and apparently few people were impressed. One problem is probably that expectations were out of hand. Everyone was expecting to see the dual-screen Courier tablet, but Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that product won’t be ready until later this year. So what we got, instead, was a tablet that PCWorld called “basically a color e-reader running Amazon Kindle software. ” TGDaily.com responded with a “woo bloody hoo.”

I still think that when this new market space finally settles down and we can see who the players are, we’ll get a clearer picture on how media – including newspapers, blogs, magazines and other organizations – will deliver their product. Amazon’s Kindle has pretty much demonstrated that readers will pay a small fee for the convenience of wireless delivery, but there’s no competition yet, and the publications feel Amazon’s taking advantage of them, insisting on too big a slice of the pie.